By Kristina Peterson, Rebecca Ballhaus and Laura Meckler
WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Friday signed a sweeping
$1.3 trillion bill detailing U.S. spending levels until October,
dropping a threat to veto the bill just hours before the
government's funding was due to expire.
Mr. Trump's televised announcement that he had signed the
spending bill capped a tumultuous week of negotiations over the
legislation, which was unveiled Wednesday night. The bill passed
the House on Thursday and the Senate early Friday. Most lawmakers
then left Washington for a two-week recess, assuming the president
would sign the bill before the government's funding expired at
12:01 a.m. Saturday, as his top aides said that he would.
But Mr. Trump upended the process, writing in a tweet Friday
morning he might veto the bill because he didn't like its
immigration provisions. By early Friday afternoon, the president
said he had decided the bill's boost for military spending had
persuaded him to sign it after all. The bill lifts military
spending by $80 billion and domestic spending by $63 billion above
limits set in 2011.
"As a matter of national security, I've signed this omnibus
budget bill, " Mr. Trump said, before quickly adding that there
were "a lot of things I'm unhappy about in this bill."
Mr. Trump said the package lifted federal spending too much, and
he chastised congressional leaders for releasing the 2,232-page
bill without giving lawmakers and the White House enough time to
read it.
"I say to Congress -- I will never sign another bill like this
again," Mr. Trump said.
The spending bill funds the government until Oct. 1. Mr. Trump's
warning suggests Congress could end up in a fiscal standoff with
him barely a month before the midterm elections, although lawmakers
might opt to pass a short-term extension.
The bill does nothing to help young undocumented immigrants who
had been protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals program. Mr. Trump ended that program in September but
gave Congress until this month to legislate a replacement.
Meanwhile, a federal court has ordered that the administration
continue the program for now, easing some of the urgency for
lawmakers to agree to a fix.
On Friday, Mr. Trump repeatedly blamed Democrats for the bill's
lack of a DACA measure, even though Democrats strongly support such
protections and had offered to include protections for the DACA
population along with $25 billion for a border wall, a proposal Mr.
Trump rejected.
"We wanted to include DACA in this bill," Mr. Trump told
reporters. "The Democrats would not do it."
As recently as Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump's senior aides said
he would sign the bill. But in a tweet early Friday, Mr. Trump
warned he might veto it and complained that DACA recipients had
been "totally abandoned by the Democrats" and that "the BORDER
WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not
fully funded."
The veto threat prompted lawmakers from both parties to urge him
to sign the bill, the product of weeks of intense bipartisan
negotiations. A veto would have likely led to a government
shutdown, given that most members of Congress had already left
Washington.
But some conservatives cheered Mr. Trump on, encouraging him to
abandon the measure because they said it provided too little
funding for the border wall and too much funding for the rest of
the government.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, had also opposed the spending bill
because it didn't include an extension of the DACA program.
"I could not support the government funding bill because it
fails to address the uncertainty and fear Dreamers live with every
day," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said in a statement Friday
morning. "President Trump unilaterally rescinded DACA and has since
rejected every single bipartisan proposal that would solve the
problem he created."
The spending bill includes $1.57 billion for construction of
physical barriers on the border with Mexico and other security
measures. Mr. Trump won funding for 33 miles of new fencing on the
Texas border -- about half of what he requested. He also got
funding for 60 miles of replacement or secondary fencing. That was
more than Mr. Trump asked for but is also far less
controversial.
"It does a lot of what we wanted," White House budget director
Mick Mulvaney said Thursday.
Democrats won a number of concessions in the spending bill,
particularly regarding immigration enforcement inside the U.S. The
bill also specified that the new border construction must use
designs now in use, which rules out a solid concrete wall.
In January, Democrats tried to use their leverage on spending
bills to force negotiations over a permanent resolution to the DACA
issue. But the ensuing three-day government shutdown produced only
a series of votes in the Senate on a handful of immigration
measures, none of which got the 60 votes needed to advance.
Mr. Trump opposed a bipartisan Senate immigration proposal that
administration officials said didn't meet all of his requirements,
and turned down the deal that would have paired $25 billion in
border-wall spending with a path to citizenship for people eligible
for DACA. The president has said legal protections for the Dreamers
must be paired with tighter border security, including funding for
a wall, as well as curbs to the family-based migration system and
an end to the diversity visa lottery, which makes eligible for
entry 50,000 people from countries that are underrepresented.
The spending measure includes more money for the National
Institutes of Health, Head Start and child-care programs, opioid
research and treatment, veterans' health care and
infrastructure.
At the White House on Friday, Mr. Trump said he was
"disappointed" the bill funded items he considered a waste of
money, without specifying which ones.
Mr. Trump also reiterated his call to lower the voting threshold
in the Senate, where most bills need 60 votes to clear procedural
hurdles. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose Republicans
control 51 of the 100 seats, has said there is no appetite for
changing that threshold.
Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com, Rebecca
Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com and Laura Meckler at
laura.meckler@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 23, 2018 16:32 ET (20:32 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.